I recently noticed that the Sony Reader PRS-505 does not support the following Esperanto characters: ĉĝĥĵŝŭĈĜĤĴŜŬ. They just show up as question marks!

Anyway I'd like to have a script to be able to auto-convert these letters either by adding h to them, so ĉ would become ch, ĝ -> gh, and ŭ -> u. What would be the easiest way to write a script to do this? Could I write a plug-in for Calibre? Is there an easy way to load an ePub file into a free [Mac] editor and just run a global search and replace on the entire file? I'm really frustrated the PRS-505 doesn't have true unicode support. Thanks for any direction you can give me into how to go about this!

That's probably missing characters in the default font (Unicode is huge, don't expect any font to support all Unicode characters). I believe you can change the font in the Sony, that would be better than modifying the text.

By the way, modifying the text once the contents of the ePUB are unzipped would be fairly easy with any text editor or unix utilities such as tr.

It has no DRM on it, but how can I edit the CSS? Whenever I try to open an ePub file in a text editor, I just see garbage.

ePUB files are just zip files. Unzip it with Winzip or similar and you'll see the contents. When zipping back the files (if you do that) the only thing you have to consider is that the "mimetype" file has to be first in the archive, and stored with no compression.

If these files are just for personal use, your other option would be to change the fonts on your Sony Reader for fonts which do include the "central European" characters that Esperanto uses. Instructions for doing that are in the Sony Reader forum.

If these files are just for personal use, your other option would be to change the fonts on your Sony Reader for fonts which do include the "central European" characters that Esperanto uses. Instructions for doing that are in the Sony Reader forum.

Actually, the thread for changing the fonts in ePub for the 505/700 is a sticky in the ePub forum section.